Daring to Try

And I’m not talking about the maternal-instinct so-they-will-survive stuff (like sleep deprivation and all those things I blocked out of selective memory).

I’m talking about Daring to Try.

For my son’s 5th birthday, we had a dance party for 17 kids ages 3-8. Two months prior to Max’s birthday, we attended a cousin’s wedding, which is where we introduced my kids to the dance floor.

This would probably be a good time to mention that I really can’t dance. I try. I have fun. But to be honest, I’m not very good at it. I’m a big ball of uncoordinated, awkward self-consciousness.

But what I’ve come to understand about my kids is: They. Don’t. Care. They just want me. Having fun. With them.

I see the way my kids look at me with awe and love. It’s like they take my own awe and love of them, multiply it and thrust it back upon me.

My kids see me with God’s eyes. With God’s love. And with all my humanness, imperfections, and limitations, they still see awesomeness.

I have two choices here:

I can correct them: tell them why I’m not-quite-good-enough and effectively model self-doubt

Or I can make an effort. I can try. I can model humility and try, and try, and try again…

It’s not all that easy to try… In her book, Daring Greatly, Brené Brown explains how putting yourself out there requires quite a bit of vulnerability and courage. It doesn’t come naturally. It’s a choice. A choice I want my kids to make. So I force myself to model it.

So for Max’s 5th birthday, I gathered 2 hours of kid-friendly dance music, including lots of line dancing stuff apropos for weddings, and burned the playlist to a 2-cd set as the party favor. Then we cleared the furniture out of the living room, set up some dance lights, and effectively turned the living room into a dance floor.

That was the easy stuff. At a certain point, it became necessary to actually lead the line dances. In case I wasn’t clear on this, let me lay it out: I would rather have crawled under a rock and died than get up in front of people and lead the Electric Slide.

Except that’s not true. Not when I look into the eyes of my kids and see their joyful desire.

So I threw caution to the wind and I Dared to Try. And the kids Loved. It. Everyone had a blast. Including me.

There’s a post I found through Pinterest called “Waking Up Full of Awesome.” The author, Melissa, posts an appropriately absolutely awesome picture of her 5 year old and reflects on the phenomenon of how we once – when we were 5 – “woke up full of awesome.” And at some point most of us lose that.

I don’t want that for my boys. And I don’t want that for me. And neither does God.

I want them to see their awesomeness as clearly as I do. And I want to see my own awesomeness as clearly as they do.

Because that–with all that awesomeness–is how God sees me. So that’s where I’d like to be. For now, my next step is focusing on Daring to Try.